At the heart of Europe, police have begun fingerprinting children on the basis of their race – with barely a murmur of protest from European governments. Last week, Silvio Berlusconi‘s new rightwing Italian administration announced plans to carry out a national registration of all the country’s estimated 150,000 Gypsies – Roma and Sinti people – whether Italian-born or migrants. Interior minister and leading light of the xenophobic Northern League, Roberto Maroni, insisted that taking fingerprints of all Roma, including children, was needed to “prevent begging” and, if necessary, remove the children from their parents.

The ethnic fingerprinting drive is part of a broader crackdown on Italy’s three-and-a-half million migrants, most of them legal, carried out in an atmosphere of increasingly hysterical rhetoric about crime and security. But the reviled Roma, some of whose families have been in Italy since the middle ages, are taking the brunt of it.

Rome is abuzz with rumours after a string of controversies involving Silvio Berlusconi and ambitious TV starlets. It’s not the first time the Italian premier’s playboy lifestyle has brought him attention. But this time the accusations could land him in court, reports John Hooper.

THOUSANDS of mourners flocked to the funeral on Wednesday of Jeno Koka, the seventh Hungarian Gypsy to be murdered in similar attacks since July 2008: here.